Le Flâneur LN

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I was a delegate at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit one year ago to discuss fashion and sustainability. Towards the end of the conference my friends and I grew frustrated at how the conference was being facilitated and the lack of novel solutions being discussed. One conference facilitator said my friend’s ideas were too radical. We ended up disobeying conference formalities and staged an unexpected protest on stage in front of thousands of fashion industry leaders. STOP! In the name of fashion.

Consistently throughout the 20th and 21st centuries we have seen a number of international conferences that aim to develop human rights and environmental stewardship. Blah blah blah. Talk about the U.N. Sustainable Development goals. Clean water for everyone? Access to nutritional food? Closed loop production systems that don’t leak toxic waste into our water systems? Did you really have to discuss that for hours on end and fly people from around the world and pick them up in BMW’s to figure that out? How was your multi-thousand dollar business class flight used to discuss how to help people who earn less than a dollar a day? Talk about UNsustainable goals. The resources to the solutions to all such issues exist, they’re just not distributed accordingly. All these conferences are often just ego-boosters, temporary moments of comfort and distractions to sedate people from actually doing something about today’s humanitarian environmental issues.

Sure perhaps these conferences bridge information gaps and people learn new things, but why are there consistently informational gaps between generations? Don’t people of different generations communicate with each other anymore? Either way, there must be a more reasonable means of communication instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a conference.

The next time I’m invited to a sustainability conference to talk about the UNsustainable development goals I am most likely going to have to pass. I’d much rather focus on actually working on sustainability projects instead of just talking about them. I’ve had enough. Time to get to work.

If you haven’t heard this news that’s already a couple of years old: Nestlé doesn’t believe that water should be a public right. Instead, it sucks up water from local water sheds and sells that water in plastic bottles.

No more kit-kats, twin-popsicles, yoghurt, chocolate… That dairy from abused hormone pumped dairy cows isn’t great for you anyways. Not to mention all that sugar. Stop the addiction. An addiction to dairy and meat is like an addiction to cigarettes.

‘Brooks believes DuPont wants the program to fail. “They poisoned the world,” he says. “A successful medical monitoring program would give us much better data on the links between this chemical and various diseases, and DuPont would have so much liability that it couldn’t possibly compensate everyone.”’

‘“DuPont deceived as many people as they could deceive as for as long as they could,” Jim Tennant told me. “Now that their secrets are out and they’ve been forced to clean up the water, they’re starting again with a new set of chemicals. This isn’t a fight that will be won in my lifetime.”’

If you’re concerned about plastic, please read this courageous and beautifully written piece by Mariah Blake who is a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University and is working on a book about plastics.